I occasionally get asked what the hardest thing about blogging is. Particularly, blogging daily. Many assume I use some sort of voice recognition software to write these things (I don’t). All are typed by my own fair hand. I can type faster than I can fix the errors on voice recognition software. Typing really isn’t that difficult.

It doesn’t take me all that long to type up a post once I’m going. There are the occasional posts that require a bit more effort and research. Usually the ones based on various stats and facts. These might take a little longer than others. Most are just my views and opinions on things, which aren’t that hard to marshall. Often, they’re my (biblical) views on things, but usually things I’m pretty well acquainted with and so marshalling the information isn’t so hard. Some of us are just naturally built and/or trained this way anyway (go humanities!)

By far and away the hardest part of blogging – particularly daily – is idea generation. The problem with being able to write about anything is that it makes it very hard to know what to write about. Even when you narrow down your particular content and discover your specific niche, it can remain particular difficult to think about what to write. Some things are good ideas, but you might not have anything much to say about them. Other things are bad ideas and should’t be written at all. But generating ideas at all is the primary blockage in writing anything.

I have consistently found I cannot pick what will fly as a blog post anyway. Some posts I pore over, and spend a great deal of time over, get little to no traction. Others fired off quickly are widely shared. Some are written from a positon of genuine insight and the insights well worth hearing, and yet are largely overlooked. Others are pretty thin and yet get top feedback. Then, of course, there are the ones you work hard at that get picked up and the ones you felt were a bit basic and thin that weren’t well regarded. All of that is to say, I generally can’t pick what will go well.

That is except one kind of post. I am fairly certain that wading into controversy will get more views than the average. That doesn’t mean every opinion on an ongoing controversy or post that might be considered more controversial will be widely read. But controversy tends to get picked up, which is somewhat dispiriting. But there we are.

So, the hardest thing about blogging is simply content creation. This is all the harder since I mainly took myself off social media platforms. I see less stuff flying around to comment on these days. This makes content creation much harder still. But if you want to get going in blogging, the advice always remains the same: just write something. In many ways, what you write doesn’t matter. The hardest hurdle to starting a blog, the biggest barrier to keeping on going, is knowing what to write. If you write anything at all, you are doing alright.